Blessings

by Anna Quindlen

  “Did you let Mr. Cuddy go?”

  “We still have him down at the office, ma’am. On the other thing.”

  The other thing. That was the worst mistake she’d made. All those police cars moving slowly away until she’d seen the taillights burning at the end of the driveway, and then the one still parked in the turnaround and the dim silhouettes of the officers moving around the apartment over the garage. She’d turned on the baby monitor and heard them talking in loud voices: There’s a kid in here. What? Cuddy have a kid? Not that I know of. We can’t leave this kid here. She awake? Cute baby. Mrs. Blessing shivered where she sat. The sky was gray above but lightening over the pond, and as the sun slowly picked out the edges of the big mats of lavender along the stone porch foundation and the coneflowers trembling on their tall stalks behind them, another car drove in, and a woman got out. She was carrying a clipboard and a large shoulder bag, and she had the unmistakable self-important abstraction of a government worker.

  “Miss!” Mrs. Blessing had called peremptorily from her back door. “Miss! My granddaughter is upstairs in the apartment.” The woman had looked at her impassively. When she came down again carrying the baby, one of the officers came down behind her carrying the clipboard and a stuffed bear that had obviously come from the crib, and Mrs. Blessing thought that he must be a father himself, to think to take the bear. Her hands shook as she looked at the woman, who was twisting her head so that the small hand reaching from the folds of a blanket would release a strand of her hair. She remembered the German baby nurse, and how Meredith had tried to grab a coil of her mother’s hair in bed one morning, how the woman had taken her index finger and tapped, hard, across the small knuckles. Meredith had recoiled, and the woman had done it again. “You will not like it if she grabs the tablecloth at luncheon one day,” the woman had said. “This is where it all begins.”

  The woman with the clipboard and the sheriff’s officer stood talking by the car for several minutes. Mrs. Blessing went to the door and called “Miss” again, but her voice broke on the word. “The sheriff is coming out to see you, ma’am,” the sheriff’s deputy had replied.

  “I’m coming out there,” Mrs. Blessing said, then realized that she was barefoot. Her feet were cold and stiff, and she hobbled upstairs to put on slippers, never mind her clothes. Let them talk of how they’d seen her in her housecoat. She was past caring.

  From the bedroom window she had heard the car moving down the driveway, and it was too late, they were gone, taking the child who now could not be explained away, the child for whom a new story could not be fashioned out of bits and pieces of plausible lies. She had tried with the sheriff, said with her hand to her heart, “There was an infant in his room …” but the man had cut her off, kindly but firmly. “We’ve got an investigation going, ma’am. We’ve already talked to Mr. Cuddy about all that.”

  “Where is the child now?” she asked the sheriff.

  “By law we have to keep her in a foster home until we figure out where she ought to go next. By the way, Mr. Cuddy said you didn’t know anything about her.”

  Mrs. Blessing had lifted her chin and said, “Mr. Cuddy is a gentleman.”

  “There’s been times when he’s made poor choices in terms of companions, but overall I’d agree with you.”

  Even in the garage attic there was still a faint ineffable smell of baby. The sheriff’s men had gone up there, had pulled down the stairs to the attic from the ceiling in the hallway, and she wanted to make certain that they had taken nothing with them. Dust motes danced in the sunshine, and when she got to the top she was breathing hard and her hands were gray with dirt. There was a scrabbling sound in one corner, and she heard a soft thud as the cat, who had crept up after her, sprung into the hidden space he had always coveted. He disappeared beneath the back rafters, between a bank of closed boxes labeled “Simpson’s Fine Textiles” and a pair of lamps with tattered pleated shades.

  “Lunch,” Nadine shouted again from the back door of the house. “Getting too cold!”

  There was a world here, undisturbed for decades, just as there had been that world beneath the surface of the pond: a box sent down from Newport filled with riding clothes and boots that the eleven-year-old Meredith had outgrown by the time it arrived; a box put up by Mrs. Foster of Lydia’s and Sunny’s summer whites grown yellow at the hems and seams; a box sent from the city by her mother of books meant to go on guests’ bedside tables that had somehow never been unpacked; the boxes sent from the city filled with Lydia’s party dresses laid carefully between tissue and mothballs as though sometime, magically, she would become young again and put them on and follow Benny through the ballroom of the club as he offered her a mercy dance that would turn into a mercy marriage. There were boxes of photographs and scrapbooks and dance programs and matchbooks and documents and newspaper clippings, so that if it were possible to animate possessions and papers, the attic would be filled with people, and in all their various incarnations, her father in his Princeton letter sweater and his downtown suit and what he called his “golf togs,” her brother in his linen shorts and his ski sweaters and his Panama hat, her daughter in her jodhpurs and her pleated wool skirts and her going-away suit, which had somehow found its way into a box filled mostly with baby clothes. And all of Lydia’s life was here, too, beautifully tailored dresses with bound seams and shoes that had been made on a wooden last of her rather narrow foot and the few boxes of stationery she hadn’t burned, “Mrs. J. Bennet Carton” faded to gray.

  She looked over again at the “Simpson’s Fine Textiles” boxes. She had forgotten there were so many, more than twenty in all, and wondered where her father had gotten the money and why he had sent it, whether he had suspected that after he was gone her mother would cut her off somehow, or, more likely, create conditions for her support. Once she had said something to him, sitting on the Adirondack chairs by the pond, tried to thank him in some stiff and oblique way that, naturally, never mentioned money at all. He had waved his hand. “We do what we can,” he had said. She had never opened a single one of the boxes after the second one. Perhaps all the rest were filled with fabric, or newspaper, or neckties. There was no point in looking now. But the possibility that they all had thousands of dollars inside made her glad that her father had used slate on the roof and that therefore it had never leaked.

  She had not needed the money; something about marrying Benny Carton and moving to Blessings had made her mother love her, or at least approve of her, and without a word being spoken the money from the company, and from the investments her parents had made, began to appear in her accounts or in her name. Her mother came to visit occasionally, brought Meredith handmade clothes that were either too small or too large, went with Lydia to the club and watched from the veranda as she and her friends played golf, always finding someone or another with whom to engage in the kind of meaningless conversation that Ethel Blessing had always seemed to find easiest and most satisfying. The death of her husband had offered her a chance at a second life, one that appeared to be more suited to her talents and inclinations. She had a small circle of similarly situated female friends with whom she played cards, went shopping, and sailed on the Cunard ships to Europe. Once she went around the world with a group of them, and afterward she brought back a porcelain bisque doll in Chinese costume for Meredith, who was then nearly thirteen, and an enormous rope of black pearls for Lydia, which had lived ever after in a safety-deposit box. All she had said about the trip was that the food was decent, but that Singapore had been too hot and had the most peculiar smell. It was right after that trip that her mind had begun to fail. From time to time when Lydia had visited her in the nursing home where she had spent her largely insensible final years, she had seemed to think she was still aboard, and would occasionally ask where Lydia had joined the cruise. “Hong Kong,” she always said, and once her mother had said fiercely, “You oughtn’t to have missed Bangkok.”

  Here was the Chinese doll, its red robes faded
and crushed, in a box of dolls. There was the one that said “Mama,” which sounded like kittens mewing, and the one that looked like a Gibson girl with a pompadour and a parasol attached by a wire to her right hand. The Raggedy Andy was folded in upon himself near the bottom. The Raggedy Ann had been taken off to Virginia by Meredith when she was first married, in a truck filled with castoffs from Blessings that had furnished the farm, and Lydia had assumed that it was to be given someday to Meredith’s children, her grandchildren, who might wear Frank Askew’s ruddy hair into the next generation. She had thought Jess was ridiculous about the notion of grandchildren, working out the due dates on her fingers, keeping a bag packed so she could go off at a moment’s notice to help with bottles and diaper changes, choking the top of her old piano with photographs of newborns and toddlers. But even Lydia had had plans for some of the things in these boxes, the small smocked dresses with the matching bloomers, the soft white cotton undershirts—vests, the baby nurse had called them. Her plans had evaporated as Meredith grew older, and then they had returned with the little girl who had just been carried down her drive by policemen like evidence of a crime. As she looked around her she thought that surely there must be a way to make things as they had been, to persuade the sheriff that the baby was best off here, to make Charles understand that, as the sheriff had said, appearances had deceived her.

  There were footsteps on the stairs below and Nadine’s head poked through the entrance to the attic. “Every day, lunch at one. Every day. Two o’clock now. No lunch.”

  “I will have lunch later, Nadine.”

  “Dinnertime soon. No lunch.” She looked around. “Dirty up here.”

  “Go away, Nadine.”

  “I say, no good, no good, listen to me. You don’t listen. She don’t listen. She sit home, cry and cry. Hah!”

  “Go away, Nadine. Tell Jennifer that she may come to see me when she wants to. Tell her it was a mistake.”

  “Hah! You eat lunch.”

  “Go away.”

  The box labeled “Lydia’s things” had her old books, Kate Douglas Wiggins and a clothbound copy of The Secret Garden and a leatherbound edition of Heidi that she had been given one Christmas. Another said simply “Sunny” and contained several tweed jackets and a flat cap that she remembered her brother had worn in the autumn, his hair curling around the edges. The jackets smelled of him, of some sort of lemon stuff he’d gotten when he went to Oxford one year. She lifted one out and mothballs rained down into the rest of the box. There at the bottom was another suit, a linen one, stained and crumpled, and a hat the color of mown hay that Sunny had liked to wear with it. Lydia recognized them. She stared down into the shadowed depths of the old box and remembered her brother wearing both suit and hat as he had disappeared toward the barn that last day, with the shotgun somehow jaunty under his arm. The night before they had sat together on the banks of the pond, the lightning bugs flickering around them with their ceaseless unknowable signaling, the trout leaping joyfully, the ice making faint tapping sounds in their glasses. The dark fell softly so that soon all she could see were his cool light eyes and the white collar of his shirt, and for a long time there was silence and then a sound that she thought was a chuckle. When she turned to him she had seen the tears glistening silver on his face. He was past forty then, but he was as unlined as a child, and as unashamed as one, too, as he wept and looked out over the deeper black of the water set in the black of the lawn.

  “What is it, Sunny?” she had said softly.

  “Ah, Lydie,” he’d replied with a great gallant sniff, “my own true love is gone.”

  “You never told me about any of that,” she’d said.

  “No,” he said simply, as though he never would.

  The hat and the suit had been like his hair and his skin and all the rest of him, pale golden. She lifted up both and wondered how the hat had not been damaged. Perhaps he had taken it off first; it had lain on the barn floor to one side of his body. She remembered that she had felt herself wondering, inconsequentially, whether he had been wearing it even as she had felt herself breathing hard and felt herself screaming, screaming, until Mr. Foster had come running from the garage, carrying a gun himself. “My brother has had an accident,” she cried, and the older man had looked, then held her back while she twisted in the twilight, so that it must have looked as if they were dancing, even embracing, the hat a light blur beside them, like the moon.

  She had never known exactly what had happened to the clothes Sunny was wearing that day. She had never thought that the Fosters might have saved them, perhaps been afraid to throw them away. The back of the suit was grimy on one shoulder but largely untouched, and the front was stiff with blood, as though someone had bundled it up still damp and pushed it here into the box that said “Sunny” on it. The jacket hung low on one side, and with shaking hands she found his billfold in one breast pocket, and wondered that she had not noticed at the time that it was missing. She was trembling now, and faint, and her arm hurt so, and she went over to an old chair, its spindles cracked and awry as a spider’s legs, and sat down. The black leather was still supple and shiny, and inside there was some money: two twenty-dollar bills and six singles. Business cards from the advertising agency: “Sumner E. Blessing, assistant vice president.” A card from the Continental Club with a phone number written on the back in the old way: “Clearview 7, 8579.” There was no license; Sunny had learned to drive one summer in the Fosters’ truck, driven it into an old oak across the road, and never tried again. “I can’t imagine going anywhere that’s not accessible by train, taxi, or limousine,” he liked to say.

  That was all there was until she reached into the recess behind the business cards. There was a flimsy square of paper there, and a photograph. The photograph was folded so that only two thirds of it appeared, a very old photograph, black-and-white with a stippled margin, of Sunny and Benny by the split-rail fence around the far field. They were squinting into the bright summer sunlight, and Sunny had his arm around Benny, and his head cocked slightly toward him, as though he was waiting for him to say something. There was a deep fold in the picture, but even before she turned it slowly in her hand, Lydia knew what had been left out. She flattened it on her lap, smoothing it with her fingers gently, as though she could make the fold go away, and there on Sunny’s other side she stood, her brother’s other arm around her shoulders. But the picture had been divided for so long that when she unfolded it it broke in two, and there were the two boys together, and the other piece pinwheeled to the dusty floor.

  The folds were deep in the paper put away with the picture, too. It was the paper, thin as tissue, that the boys had used to send letters home from the war. In Benny’s familiar, almost illegible handwriting it said, “Greetings, pal. Don’t worry. Everything stays the same. Ben and Sun to the end, just like in Newport. You know.”

  She sat there until the wind had died down, so that the tap of the metal blinds came only occasionally, as though someone was asking to come inside. “Lunch now,” Nadine shouted again. “Lunch now or I go.” But she was not hungry as she turned the picture over in her hands and wondered whether Sunny had meant her to find the wallet after he was dead, and whether, in some circuitous fashion that had taken her her entire life to unravel, she had killed him when she had saved herself.

  They were coming at eleven, the sheriff had told him. The man owned an insurance agency in Loganville, twenty miles north. His wife was a seventh-grade English teacher. Their daughter was a sophomore at the state university. They were coming at eleven to Mrs. Blessing’s house. It had taken almost a week to iron things out. The meeting at Blessings, that was the sheriff’s idea, to spare them all the scent of disinfected corridors and the stares of people wearing laminated ID tags and maybe even a couple of local reporters who got wind of the story. But Skip thought it might also be poetic justice, Mrs. Blessing having to see what she’d done where she’d done it. And that girl, too. They were coming at eleven.

 
“Tell them I’ll give them a car seat,” Skip said. “They need to put her in a car seat. Tell them that’s the law.”

  They were coming at eleven and Skip started to drive at nine-thirty in the morning, right after the social worker, her mouth tight, had handed Faith back to him. She’d been with a foster mother somewhere out on one of the farms for five days, and she was wearing a dress that left her little legs bare from foot to thigh. She kicked and kicked as though she liked it, and the skirt of the dress, which was yellow with rocking horses printed on it in blue and pink, flew up over her face, and she sneezed and beat the air with her fists. She smelled like talc. Talc was bad for babies.

  “Support her head,” the social worker said as she handed her over.

  “I’ve been supporting her head since the day she was born,” Skip said.

  That had done it, just pushed him past the point of standing the whole thing. He’d given her two ounces of formula in the front seat with the door open so they both wouldn’t be stifled by the dead air in the truck, making certain that her bib was on tight so if she spit up, the dress wouldn’t get stained. She stared at him as she sucked hard on the nipple, and curled her hand as she always did around the one he was holding the bottle with, raising and lowering her fingers slowly. Halfway through the bottle her lids began to lower. Her lashes looked so long, and her fingers, too, and for a moment it was like he was seeing her again for the first time, lifting her from the box into the light and knowing in his gut that she was his.